I had some pretty annoying problems trying to get OneNote Mobile to sync -
and eventually worked through it. I did search the newsgroups, and found a
number of other people with problems. I figured I'd post what I found in the
event it helps others.

I had OneNote installed via my Office 2007 Ultimate installation late last
year. I kept hearing how OneNote was the next best thing to sliced bread. So
finally, I thought I'd check it out. Up to this point, I hadn't even launched
the program. I had a completely default installation.

Within about an hour, I had started, failed and almost abandoned using it.
When I launched OneNote, I was rather excited to see the inclusion of a
mobile version, and followed the one page instructions to install it. The
installation transpired just as it was outlined, the taskbar app indicated my
mobile device was eligible for the mobile client, and I installed it.

The problem I ran into is that the sync process failed and ActiveSync gave
me a completely generic error, indicating only "attention required".

In searching the web and newsgroups, I found that I should have a "OneNote
Mobile" notebook for things to sync, and that the mobile client would just
sync pages with this notebook, not everything.

I reset my ActiveSync partnership a few times, restarted my machine and
OneNote - and every time, the exact same scenario. Finally out of
frustration, I thought maybe I can manually create this "mobile notebook". I
went to create a new notebook, and received an error. This obscure error,
made me realize that if I can't create a new notebook, obviously neither
could an automated process.

It turns out that my issue was with my domain user account that had folder
redirection enabled. Because of folder redirection my “documents” as the
default notebook location, really meant that my default location was
\\server\share\directory\file and when I'd try to create a new notebook in
this default location, I’d get an error that the location
"http://server/share/directory/file" was not accessible.

Therein lies the rub. For whatever reason OneNote was interpreting my UNC
path as a URL. I went into my settings, changed the default storage and temp
locations to a local machine path, and verified I was able to then create new
notebooks.

I restarted OneNote, then disconnected and reconnected my phone to force a
sync, and viola; it created the OneNote Mobile notebook and successfully
completed the sync.

So - if you've at your wits end with a sync problem, make sure you're not
using a UNC path for your storage location. And if you work on the OneNote
team - feel free to chime in if this is a normal operation.

Thank you.

D. Gabriel wrote:
> It turns out that my issue was with my domain user account that had folder
> redirection enabled. Because of folder redirection my “documents” as the
> default notebook location, really meant that my default location was
> \\server\share\directory\file and when I'd try to create a new notebook in
> this default location, I’d get an error that the location
> "http://server/share/directory/file" was not accessible.

There's a bug in OneNote SP1 that will cause this behavior if the same
computer is hosting both a file share and a web server, and you attempt
to open a notebook from the file share. A fix is in development. In the
meantime, you can workaround this bug by not running the webserver on
the same server as the file share. Another possibility, if you have
offline caching enabled, is to disconnect your computer from the network
while you are creating the notebook. Once the notebook is created it
should work normally.

Ilya